Amsterdam Pt. III

Ryan and I had so much fun exploring the city together!  Our sleep schedules got so messed up while we were there though, so some days we would take a long nap in the early evening that went all the way into the very early morning and we would be wide awake by crazy hours!  A couple mornings we could not fall back asleep and decided to just get our day started so we would leave our hotel and start walking down the streets of Amsterdam to realize that pretty much nobody in that city wakes up and nothing is open until at least after 7 am, but those early mornings were some of the best exploring we would do.

Day 3 we started our day extra early so that we could get in line to tour the Anne Frank House.  We waited in line for about an hour before they opened because once they open for the day the line gets extremely long, but it was so worth the long wait in the cold!  This was an amazing experience to be able to walk through the house that Anne Frank and her family hid out during the Holocaust.  It was awesome to learn so much about what they went through.  There were no pictures allowed inside which was sad because it was incredible to see the original bookcase and some of the other stuff that was still there, but as you walked through there were quotes written all along the walls that came straight from her diary she wrote.  We also got to see the original diary at the end of the tour that she wrote in and it was so neat to see that in person! 

After the Anne Frank house we went to the Keukenhof tulip gardens to see all the beautiful tulips of Holland!  We unfortunately were there just a few weeks too soon so the rows and fields of tulips were not all bloomed but we decided to take a little boat tour around the fields anyways to see the fields and learn a little bit about tulips.  After that we walked around the gardens, tried lots of different foods, went to the top of a windmill, had lots of photos taken in wooden shoes, and walked through the greenhouse full of thousands of tulips!  They were so beautiful! 

A mini replica of the shop and annex 

Selfie with Anne Frank

At Keukenhof

Walking through the gardens

Boat tour of the tulip fields

Ryan spotted this sign with my Dutch maiden name Visser!

Inside the greenhouse there were thousands of different tulips!

Now behold, almost a thousand tulip pictures!

I loved all the oversized wooden shoes we would find all over Amsterdam

This little music cart was so neat!  One of the workers would put a stack of paper in the back and it would read the music and play a song using all the bells and whistles.  We were so mesmerized!